A life on the run prepared Bradley for key race

WASHINGTON {AP} Room service and television are facts of life for professional athletes. To Bill Bradley, they meant opportunity wasted.

"Every city we enter is full of crises and problems that never reach us in a hotel room," he wrote during his days as a New York Knick.

So Bradley used his peripatetic existence to study America. He dined with fans, consulted with local politicians, visited out-of-the way neighborhoods. "Under his guidance, we'd visit an art museum in Houston, or a spectacular shoreline vista in Oregon, or attend a political lecture in Boston," recalled former Knick Phil Jackson.

But such a lifestyle carried risks: After a night game in Chicago, Bradley and two friends were robbed at gunpoint while meeting outside the arena.

Bradley titled his basketball memoirs "Life on the Run." These days, the former New Jersey senator is back on the run, crisscrossing the nation in his campaign for the White House.

To both basketball and politics, Bradley has applied the same serious, studious, workaholic attitude.

He is a 6-foot-5 contradiction: independent and introspective, but drawn to public pursuits.

Longtime supporters say they are drawn to Bradley's integrity and intelligence, though his meticulousness can be maddening.

"Bill goes through this minute and detailed and, from my point of view, excruciating soul-searching before he comes to a decision," said Bradley's wife of 25 years, Ernestine.

"That's just who Bill is."

Bradley turned down a scholarship at basketball powerhouse Duke to attend Princeton. When professional basketball beckoned, he left for Oxford. Supporters urged him to run for president in 1988 and 1992, but he declined only to enter the 2000 campaign as the underdog to Vice President Al Gore.

If not for his contrary streak, he might be in the other party today.

Bradley came to Washington in 1964 as a summer intern for Pennsylvania Rep. Richard Schweiker, a Republican, and quickly moved to the presidential campaign of Republican William Scranton.

But on his own that summer, he sat in the Senate gallery and watched the debate over the Civil Rights Act.

"That's when I became a Democrat," he says.

Bradley is famously frugal despite a wealth now exceeding $5 million.

His rumpled clothing stood out amid the flashy dressers on the Knicks.

In 1996, his final year as a senator, he was still puttering around New Jersey in a 1984 Oldsmobile with 160,000 miles on it.

William Warren Bradley, an only child, was born July 28, 1943 in Crystal City, Mo.

His father, Warren, a Republican, was the quiet, dependable president of the local bank, physically limited due to severe arthritis.

His mother, Susan, was a former teacher who had her son take lessons in everything from typing to swimming, the French horn to the French language. (Dad drew the line at ballet.)

Young Bill spent countless hours alone with a basketball, pieces of lead in his sneakers to improve his jumping.

"I've never seen a little boy as focused as Bill was," said Carol Cunningham, who lived next door. "This concept that if you were going to do anything, then you had to do it the very best you can, is from his mother.

"She had the strongest will I've ever seen in any human being."

As a freshman at Princeton, Bradley "was constantly afraid of flunking out," said classmate Dan Okimoto.

"He approached studies with the same intensity, commitment, determination, discipline that he approached basketball.

"He would go study until 2 a.m. after a basketball game."

Still, Bradley found time to teach Sunday school at Princeton's First Presbyterian Church and to have a social life, including some dates with Diane Sawyer, then a student at Wellesley College.

A three-time All-American at Princeton, Bradley led the U.S. basketball team to the gold medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

He raised eyebrows outside the sport as well.

In 1964, New York Post columnist Leonard Shecter wrote, "In 25 years or so our presidents are going to have to be better than ever.